Movie Review – “The Monkey”

Movie Review – The Monkey

I’ve always liked Stephen King. The first time I encountered a story of his was in the excellent 1982 horror movie Creepshow. The local mini-mart had candy bars for fifty cents, and I vividly remember my mom telling me that when she was a kid, they were fifteen cents—and me thinking she was so very old. Flash forward to now, and candy bars are two dollars, and I’m sharing similar memories with my kids, who probably think I’m just as ancient.

This story does have a point.

The mini-mart—a 76 station—had a spinner rack of comic books and a pretty decent-sized magazine section as well. This was way back before the digital jungle, when, if you wanted to read a lengthy story or interview about anything, you had to turn to magazines and books. Now, I was so young I didn’t know this at the time, but even as a little kid, I loved magazines and articles about horror movies. It was a way to see behind the curtain, and I’d often find myself digging into publications like Fangoria and Cinemafantastique to catch behind-the-scenes peeks at my favorite movies or read interviews with up-and-coming directors like John Carpenter and James Cameron.

I’m getting to my point.

As I entered the store one day, I saw a comic book—but not quite a comic book—facing forward on the magazine rack. The cover drew me in immediately: a kid voraciously reading a horror comic in bed, unaware of the giant, hooded skeleton lurking just outside his window. It was called Creepshow.

I think the cover price was $3.95 or something, which was basically eight times what one of my usual comic book purchases would have cost, so I didn’t get it. But the next week, I saw the VHS of Creepshow (the movie the comic was promoting) on the shelf at our small town’s rental store, Showtime Video—and I had to watch it. This was my gateway into the world of who many would go on to dub “The Master of Horror,” Stephen King.

What followed were years of reading his books, interviews, and watching probably 20 movie adaptations of his work.

Flash forward to 2025, and I don’t read too much fiction anymore—but I do enjoy a good horror movie. The last few years have had some solid entries, including my favorite horror film of the last decade or so, The Substance. Recently, a movie based on a King story was released called The Monkey, and even though “comedy horror” films aren’t really my thing, I thought I’d give it a go.

The Monkey is based on a short story from the excellent 1985 collection Skeleton Crew. This is the same book that gave us The Mist, as well as a lesser-known story called The Raft. Both made it to the screen years later—the former as a big-budget feature film, and the latter as one of the vignettes in Creepshow 2.

This new film is directed by Osgood Perkins of Longlegs fame (perhaps the most overrated film of 2024), and is produced by James Wan, creator of The Conjuring universe. It stars Theo James as identical twins Hal and Bill Shelburn—brothers who discover a strange wind-up monkey among their absent father’s belongings.

There is more to the monkey, however, than meets the eye. Each time the key is twisted, someone dies. It starts with their babysitter—killed in a gruesome accident at a teppanyaki spot—then their mother, and then a whole host of others. The brothers try to get rid of the toy, but it always comes back, wreaking havoc on the world around them.

While the movie wasn’t my thing, I don’t really fault the cast and crew. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t enjoy comedy horror—but this film seemed unsure whether it wanted to be serious or funny. The deaths were absurd, which I liked, but the punchlines never quite landed. The whole thing felt like one long exercise in more of the same.

Now, there is something I did like about the film. No, not the Elijah Wood cameo—though I did dig that. And no, not the possible alternate-universe version of Annie Wilkes, the obsessed psychopath from Misery. Something else.

I noticed something I never picked up from the story as a kid: the monkey is almost certainly an analogy for addiction—and for generational curses.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Stephen King was deep in the grip of a terrible cocaine and alcohol addiction. He writes about it extensively in the excellent non-fiction book On Writing, where he tells how it nearly tore his family apart.

Each time the monkey is turned on, terrible things happen. And no matter how hard you try to rid yourself of it, it only ends up finding you again. And when it does, everyone around its owner is fair game.

Whether King knew this when he wrote The Monkey, I’m not entirely sure—but he’s a self-aware and smart enough person that I’d bet he did.

For one of the brothers, the monkey triggers a deep obsession that pulls him back into a cycle of fear, paranoia, and distress. He can’t escape the memory or his destructive behavior—mirroring the way addiction draws someone back, despite their best efforts to move forward.

Overall, The Monkey doesn’t hold up as well as its short story counterpart. It’s surface-level horror that traffics in tropes without adding anything new. The characters aren’t built in a way that makes you care much at all—which makes the already cheap kills feel even cheaper.

It’s Final Destination… Stephen King style.

Rating: 1.5/5

TM Rush